It is naively optimistic and recklessly trusting for Simon Jenkins to believe that digital media can be depended on to right the wrongs of political lies (Post-truth politics will be debunked by online facts, 26 January).
In an era of multiple media sources, characterised by rapid dissemination and high volume, news and politics consumption is developing as news bites, quickly digested before moving on.
There are two dimensions of this phenomenon that carry serious risks for democratic debate.
First, although accuracy can be more easily checked and lies rebutted, the sheer volume of inaccurate social media material means that not everything can be corrected. This is recognised by political charlatans and is a tactic of the “alt-right” in streaming tidal surges of lies and garbage. Although some may be repudiated, much will not – and the effects of this shape social perception. This was the strategy of Brexiteers, Ukippers on immigration and the alt-right drip-drip dismantling of the Obama legacy and Clinton inheritance.
The second danger is that the historical record of truth is trampled over to provide “alternative facts”. There has always been a risk of history being rewritten, from Japanese textbooks presenting an “alternative” history of the Nanjing massacre of 1937 and other war crimes committed against China during the second world war to David Irving’s Holocaust denial over the murder of Jews at Auschwitz.
The risk to historical truth is heightened in a social media world in which truth and alternative truth increasingly live side by side. We need new corrective mechanisms to ensure a common trusted understanding of our past. These should also serve to right political lies in everyday life so that we can make sense of the present and direct the future.
Andrew Winfield
Stratton, Cornwall
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